Pantojas, broadening his horizons, started taking acting lessons with Ernesto Concepción in Walter Mercado's Academy.
Pantoja's career as a transvestite performer began when he was auditioning for a role in a theater production, and the only one left was a woman's part.
A versatile thespian, he played roles as diverse as Estragon and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Juliet in El público (The Audience) by Federico García Lorca (in its world premiere in Puerto Rico in 1978), and the small-time street-wise narrator in La verdadera historia de Pedro Navaja, one of the longest-running plays in Puerto Rico's history, based on the Three Penny Opera.
Pantojas stated that his face and his body had changed, and as he was a versatile actor, he could carry out different roles, pursuing his career as a performer in many ways.
He portrayed a priest, Father Amado, in the theater production El silencio es salud (Silence Is Health), performed at the Centro Cultural Clemente Soto Vélez (The Clemente Soto Cultural Center) in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and he was featured as Amalia in the motion picture Under My Nails (2012).